PROCESS AND METHODOLOGY
The process to arrive at the findings included:
• Pre-planning meeting with community representatives
• Public input
• Qualitative analysis of input
• Discussions with relevant community groups, MoH and VIHA to determine timeframes and viability of action
• Findings incorporated into Framework for Action
Pre-Planning Meeting
A Creative Planning Dialogue approach was used in the pre-planning session. Representatives from 14 community groups on Gabriola Island were invited to attend the session. Twelve people participated in the May 21rst, 2008 pre-planning meeting. Physicians from each of the Gabriola clinics attended the meeting together with representatives from the Ratepayers, Gabriola Emergency Services Society (GESS), Ambulance Society, the Hope Centre, the Gathering Place, the Lions, and the Gabriola Health Care Society.
The purpose of this session was to determine “the question” that needed to be asked of Gabriolans related to primary health care on Gabriola and how community input would be gathered. It was decided that a public session inviting everyone in the community would be held and the underlying question(s) of the public session would be “Primary Health Care, What is it? What can it look like on Gabriola? How can we build on our partnerships in the future? (See Appendix A for full proceedings)
Public Input and Engagement
Public input was gathered through two key routes. One was a day long session June 20th, 2008 open to the public and advertised throughout the community. The second was through a web blog so that those who were unable to attend the public session could provide input.
The public session was comprised of two parts. The morning sessions used the Open Space format to ensure that all participants could determine what topics were discussed and then could choose what topics they wanted to participate in. The afternoon sessions used a Courtyard Café approach in which participants were able to pick two of 11 café topics they wanted to discuss. The café topics were drawn from the discussion at the pre-planning meeting and the topic areas under Primary Health Care. The comments made in both the morning and afternoon discussions were posted to the website within a week of the public session (See Appendix B for public session results).
The web blog was set up June 3rd and has 11 topic areas that are consistent with the café topics discussed at the Public Session. There is also one category that is open to other comments. Comments from the blog entered up until July 15th were collected and included in the analysis for this report.
Qualitative Analysis of Data
The comments from the public session and blog were then analyzed in terms of common themes. Several concepts or areas were repeated throughout the blog, morning sessions and afternoon sessions. These included Coordination of community services, Communication, Physician Retention, Primary Health Care integration of services, Chronic care management services, Data, and Long Term Planning.
All of the points made in the public session discussions and the blog were then placed under one of the areas identified. These were broken down into Challenges, Opportunities and Solutions. A Framework for Action was then developed based on the identified Solutions.
Discussions with Relevant Organizations
Implementation of the identified solutions requires a variety of organizations to take responsibility for implementation and to provide a timeline and first steps in that implementation.
The next step in the process was to have conversations with those implicated in implementing the proposed solutions to determine their commitment, their timeline and their next steps. These were then incorporated into the Framework for Action that is found on the following pages.